pinentry-curses - PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG
pinentry-curses [OPTION...]
pinentry-curses is a program that allows for secure entry of PINs or pass phrases. That means it tries to take care that the entered information is not swapped to disk or temporarily stored anywhere. This functionality is particularly useful for entering pass phrases when using encryption software such as GnuPG or e-mail clients using the same. It uses an open protocol and is therefore not tied to particular software.
pinentry-curses implements a PIN entry dialog using the curses tool kit, meaning that it is useful for users working in text mode without the X Window System. There are other flavors that implement PIN entry dialogs that use an X tool kit. If you have installed any of the latter programs then this program is not necessary because the X flavors automatically fall back to text mode if X is not active.
pinentry-curses is typically used internally by gpg-agent. Users don't normally have a reason to call it directly.
Print the program version and licensing information.
Print a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options.
Turn on some debugging. Mostly useful for the maintainers. Note that this may reveal sensitive information like the entered pass phrase.
Ask for timeouts and insurance, too. Note that this is currently not fully supported.
Grab the keyboard only when the window is focused. Use this option if you are debugging software using pinentry-curses; otherwise you may not be able to to access your X session anymore (unless you have other means to connect to the machine to kill pinentry-curses).
Use window ID N as the parent window for positioning the window. Note, that this is not fully supported by all flavors of pinentry.
These options are used to pass localization information to pinentry-curses. They are required because pinentry-curses is usually called by some background process which does not have any information on the locale and terminal to use. Assuan protocol options are an alternative way to pass these information.
pinentry-gtk-2(1), pinentry-qt(1), pinentry-fltk(1), pinentry-gnome3(1), pinentry-tty(1), gpg(1), gpg-agent(1)
The full documentation for pinentry-curses is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the pinentry-doc package is installed, the command
info pinentry
should give you access to the complete manual.
This manual page was written by Peter Eisentraut for the Debian project.